2026-03-17 02:28:46

$370 is enough to manipulate the price of a prediction market.

An article on LessWrong broke down several cases: Scott Alexander cited Anthropic's valuation market on Polymarket, saying "the market believes there's a 90% probability it will reach $500B". The author checked the orderbook, and the YES side had only $370 in total depth. Spending that amount could crash the price from 90% down to 76%.

Even more absurd is that for the same event, Kalshi showed 37% while Polymarket showed 22%. A 15 percentage point difference, because liquidity on both sides is so poor that the prices have no reference value. There are also markets on Manifold with zero trades for an entire week, yet they still get cited.

My own trading experience on Polymarket reflects this too — many markets have a displayed price, but the order book is so thin that a single trade of just tens of dollars can move the price several percentage points. Price existing and price being meaningful are two different things.

The original article is worth reading:

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